Jesse
Phillippe: Prof. Roediger, thanks so much for taking the time to
discuss your work with me.Many
Americans think our country’s racist past is long gone,
especially after Obama’s two election victories.But the 2012
killing of Trayvon Martin and Georgia’s 2011 execution of Troy
Davis indicate maybe it isn't.What are your thoughts on where we
stand today?

Roediger:
Such tragedies as those of Davis and Martin remind us of the
continuation of racism dramatically.Both such instances and the
broader trends that produce them are important.When I wrote How
Race Survived U.S. History
in 2008 I kept near my computer a post-it note with just two social
facts scribbled on it.The disparity of white wealth to African
American wealth was seven-fold in favor of whites and the disparity
in incarceration rates for young men across racial lines made
American Americans seven times as likely to be imprisoned.Today the
wealth gap is greater still and the prison gap remains obscene.With
such continuing patterns in place it is very unlikely that a nation
with such a long history of white supremacy could somehow become
“colorblind.”

JP:
What are the major themes of your recent (May 2012) book The
Production of Difference: Race and The Management of Labor in U.S.
History?In
what ways does race management still factor into labor management
today, and how can understanding this history help us now?

Roediger:
That book looks at the history of management from about 1830 to 1930.In it, my co-author Elizabeth Esch and I examine how masters of slave
plantations, railroad builders in the U.S. West, those running U.S.
factories and mines with overwhelmingly immigrant labor forces, and
U.S. managers operating overseas consistently claimed that knowledge
of race mattered in the extraction of increased production.Often
this meant, as John Commons, the founder of labor history in the U.S.
put it a century ago, “playing one race against the other.”While the book stops well short of the present, it was very much
inspired by thinking about the patterns of management we see in
low-wage and high risk work in the present.In such labor
astonishingly diverse labor forces are pushed for ever-increasing
productivity, for example in meatpacking, hotel and restaurant labor,
and agriculture—now with the added dimension that the workers
involved can often be victimized because they are “illegal.”

JP:
The
Production of Difference
talks about the early beginnings of a faux-color blindness in the
labor management practices of Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford.Please
summarize your views on the historical effectiveness and significance
of colorblind policies.

Roediger:
Colorblind remains an oddly revealing word.On the one hand it
suggests that differences really exist regarding race and color but
that liberalism or fairness in seeing only merit and productivity
override or even annul differences.The historical pattern of Ford,
for example, was different.He created multiracial workforces, though
only in some plants, and at times pledged that since only the work
mattered everyone was treated the same.But mostly he very much
exploited Black workers differently from white workers, concentrating
them in the hot, dangerous work of the foundry, respecting color bars
in housing in neighborhoods near the plants and in the South, and
meddling in the private and community lives of African American
workers long after his company had largely stopped doing so for
immigrant workers.

JP:
Your most famous book, Wages
of Whiteness (1991),
discusses W. E. B. Du Bois’ concept of a “psychological
wage” that white working people receive from racism.How has
this psychological wage changed since the official end of Jim Crow
segregation?

Roediger:
Du Bois mentioned some practices, such as admittance to better public
facilities, clearly tied to Jim Crow as part of the “public and
psychological wage” of whiteness.At law, those absolute color
bars no longer exist but the United States remains an overwhelmingly
segregated nation in which dwindling public services and good jobs
are still distributed along racial lines, even as they get less and
less good for almost everyone.

JP:
That book quotes Du Bois as suggesting that white Southern workers
forget their interests which are “practically identical”
with those of Black workers.To what extent have their interests been
similar, and to what extent have they diverged, over the years?What’s been the trend in recent years?

Roediger:
The question requires some care.The interest in overturning a
regional social order in the South that was (and is) highly unequal
even by U.S. standards was (and is) ‘practically identical”
across the color line.Likewise the interest in a good city, a
militant union, and a just society.But, as Du Bois understood, the
appeals to poor whites did involve their getting some relative
benefits.At the time he wrote many white textile workers employed
African American maids in their homes.The color bar in textiles
reserved those jobs, which were terrible in terms of wages,
occupational health, and repression of labor organization, for
whites.The color bar also channeled Black women workers into even
more exploitative domestic service jobs, at times in working class
white households.White workers had an interest in the arrangements
of the Jim Crow order and
an interest in breaking from them.

JP:
You’ve been known to apply psychoanalytic theory to questions
of race and racism; in 2013 America, how widespread do you think
unconscious and subconscious racism are?What are some good examples?

Roediger:
My use of psychoanalysis—Du Bois by the way was quite
influenced by Freud when he wrote of a “psychological wage”—is
more geared to understanding the excess of commitment, and violence
attending that commitment, to white supremacy at times shown by
working people getting little materially out of the social order.I
think it is true that well-meaning people often subconsciously hold
racist views but that’s not a focus of my writing.Instead I
have tried, like George Rawick and James Baldwin, to think about how
projecting a desire for joy and a hatred of work onto Blacks has been
complicit in making whites not come to terms with the miseries of
alienated labor in their own lives.

JP:
Wages
of Whiteness
also described the phenomenon of “blackface-on-black”
violence, in which mobs of white men sometimes wore blackface when
terrorizing Black communities.I find this particularly puzzling.You
hypothesize that this was done out of a deep self-hatred among the
white population resulting from their hidden admiration for Black
culture.What new insights can you provide on this phenomenon since
the publication of Wages?And how does it factor into your larger psychoanalysis of racism?

Roediger:
Psychoanalytically, there was a lot going on with blackface.In its
main nineteenth century form—at times as the most popular U.S.
entertainment—it involved professional and amateur performers
smearing greasy black substances on their bodies in order to borrow
from, profit from, have fun with, and degrade African American
culture.The smearing, some scholars argue, recalled infantile
polymorphous sexuality, including playing with excrement.The shows
more simply reflected a projection onto Blacks of all sorts of
longings and fears that white workers undergoing the wrenching new
discipline of industrial capitalism themselves felt.In disguise they
could be cross-dressed, footloose, near to nature, openly sad and
vulnerable, homesick, sexual, uncaring about work, profligate in
spending—all the things their culture made it hard to
express—by being Black for a moment.They could then wipe that
identity off.Such projection, while often admiring of African
American culture, was itself an act of white violence, making the
racial other a plaything.It was also deeply associated with misery
as it evaded the real problems of proletarianization.When racist
mobs at times adopted blackface in the pre-Civil War years, as did
the Klan in the South at times after the war, the claims to
fashioning a racial order with no regard for African Americans
themselves eventuated in literal violence as well.

JP:
Now that Latinos are an increasingly important third community in the
US, what ideas from your works are most useful for understanding this
more complex contemporary scene?

Roediger:
My recent work on race and management includes, for the period from
1917 until the Great Depression especially, substantial material on
racialized management of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans and the use of
border controls and deportations against Mexicans.Much of my recent
speaking is also attempting to argue that Black-Latino solidarity
(and that among other groups not categorized as white) may now be the
most important form of interracial solidarity.While whiteness is
historically important, and still important, to how class domination
unfolds in the U.S., to place it always at the center distorts
matters, especially now.

JP:
There are Black intellectuals and public figures, like Tavis Smiley,
Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, and Julianne Malveaux, who are
frequently critical of Obama’s policies.How does such
criticism affect public consciousness generally and minority
communities in particular?

Roediger:
I think this criticism is important even when it does not immediately
win people over, and even when it may not exactly know what it wants
to win people over to.It is honest and courageous and often moves us
toward an understanding that structural and systemic problems are
more vital than personal appeals of a leader.

JP:
How do you view the Occupy Movement, the Chicago Teachers strike,
protests against school closings, and other recent social movements?

Roediger:
I think Occupy was a very important expression of many
things—reaction to the incredible accumulation of wealth at the
top of a miserable social order, debt, unemployment, new patterns of
precarious lives reaching far into the middle class, the pressing
need for Marxism and anarchism to speak to each other, a real desire
for a new society, and more.Forms like it will be back and in many
cases have not gone away.I know many of the exemplary activists in
the Chicago Teachers Union struggle and other struggles in the
state’s educational system, including an organizing drive at my
university.It does not diminish the importance of what is being done
to say that without decisive motion outside public sector unions, the
best of struggles will still be largely defensive ones.I especially
applaud the community base that so energized the Chicago strike.

JP:
What organizing and/or protest methods do you predict will be used in
the near future to combat the social ills that continue to plague
minority communities?

Roediger:
I think and hope that, as the courts shred the last bits of
affirmative action as a policy, a strong movement for reparations for
slavery will mature.If that movement includes a call to make the
places where the minority poor live into healthy environments it can
produce results that unite working people across lines of race.It
may also be—that is, one hopes—that the now nearly total
defeat of private sector unions will create space for new forms of
militant working class protest led by the working poor and far less
attuned to business as usual in terms of tactics.

JP:
Thank you for your time.Your comments have been very enlightening.

(Jul 27, 2013 04:09 PM):
We did this interview before the Zimmerman verdict, and while the response to the verdict may prove to shift the political landscape in the U.S., it is also part of what very many people have identified as an ongoing problem:
[Edited]more

From the article linked to: “while the tragic death of Trayvon — and fraught Zimmerman trial — garnered national attention, far too many cases that reveal deep cracks and prejudices in our society and system go unnoticed.”